Last November, Coldplay released an interactive video for the song “Ink” to promote its new “Ghost Stories” album. In this new video, viewers can dictate the direction of the storyline by choosing various turns in the plot during the course of the video – reminiscent of the choose your own adventure books many of us remember.

As you’ll see from this behind-the-scenes video from developer Blind, driving and measuring engagement with the video was the primary objective – which brings to question, how do you actually measure success if engagement is your key performance indicator?

In their video, Blind alludes to two metrics that can indicate engagement level: social sharing and replays of the video itself. Social shares are a common metric to measure the reach of a given piece of content, but because people so often share content without actually consuming it fully themselves, it’s not always a great indicator of engagement.

If you eliminate social sharing as a measurement, this leaves the replay metric, and, presumably the clicks on the various plot points throughout the video as two ways to measure engagement.

These two indicators can be classified as “attention” metrics. Content producers are beginning to understand the need for these attention metrics to better understand the value of their content, especially if they sell advertising or sponsorships.

In an age of flashy headlines and clickbait to lure readers, it is becoming increasingly important to measure what happens after a user clicks on a headline or presses play on a video. Analytics companies are also beginning to see the value in measuring attention, with Chart Beat being among the most prominent examples and a current leader in helping companies develop quality content that keeps a user engaged past that initial click-through.

Chart Beat CEO Tony Haile sums it up well: “Instead of trying to value ads on the fact that the page loaded with the ad on it, it’s: can you accurately measure how long the actual amount of attention you’re able to capture and then value it? If you can do that, brands will more effectively allocate capital. On the publisher side, all of the people who have invested in quality content actually have a reason to do so.”

Coldplay – “Ink” Music Video

Try out Coldplay’s interactive video:

Thinking about using video for your marketing efforts? Be sure to download Hit Pause Before Play, our video marketing plan eBook before you start: